A built-in stainless-steel bar faces the kitchen off the living room. The laminated cabinets "arc, creating a long, streamlined configuration," says the architect. "This house, so simple in shape and plan, if unusual in concept and access, was tough to construct. I was ready not to think of concrete again for a year after that."

A built-in stainless-steel bar faces the kitchen off the living room. The laminated cabinets "arc, creating a long, streamlined configuration," says the architect. "This house, so simple in shape and plan, if unusual in concept and access, was tough to construct. I was ready not to think of concrete again for a year after that."

A built-in stainless-steel bar faces the kitchen off the living room. The laminated cabinets "arc, creating a long, streamlined configuration," says the architect. "This house, so simple in shape and plan, if unusual in concept and access, was tough to construct. I was ready not to think of concrete again for a year after that."

This article originally appeared in the October 2008 issue of Architectural Digest.

For as long as I can remember, I have loved bridges and towers," says architect Jack K. Snow, of the Colorado-based firm RKD Architects. As a residential architect, he hoped one day to design a house that needed a bridge, but he never expected to design a 3,200-square-foot, two-story house accessed by way of a three-story tower, attached to a bridge that leads to an entrance hall on the top floor. This surprising and adventurous architectural feat came in response to the client's desire to build in the vicinity of a huge boulder more than halfway up the hill. It would have been very difficult to put a more conventional structure on the steeply pitched, less than half-acre site. "Instead of even trying to do this," Snow says, "we decided to put the house high on the site, right by the rock, and make a big deal of getting there."

A house can be built to project over a hill or follow the contour of a difficult slope if the entrance is accessible by car or by foot from the upper boundary. But access to this house was from the street below, and the site was too small and steep to accommodate a driveway to the top.

So Snow, with the help of his associate Renato Jose, created a plan in which the client, a retired executive and an avid skier, can make his way into the house from the street level, after parking his car in a garage partially embedded in the ground. From a door in the garage, or through the more formal visitor's entrance at the base of the tower, he can enter a small vestibule and has the choice of walking up three flights to the bridge or taking the elevator instead. Athletic and fit, the owner almost always takes the stair and sends the groceries up in the elevator.

The bridge leads to a two-story stair hall and, from there, to the living room, the kitchen and up seven steps to the dining area on the mezzanine level. The stair hall also leads downstairs to the master bedroom, a sitting room and a guest room.

Building the house was equally complicated. Three immense cuts had to be made in the slope to create platforms—one for the curved, one-story kitchen, another for the two-story rectangular block of the main house that adjoins it farther down, and a third for the base of the tower at the bottom of the hill. The exterior consists of cast-concrete walls 16 inches thick and 14½ feet wide, separated by large wood-and-glass curtain walls. Below ground, the concrete walls are part of a retaining wall system that is designed to support the immense weight of the snow-loaded, barrel-vaulted roofs. The floors are also cast concrete. And Snow made sure that the rock the owner loved would not slip down the hill in a minor landslide and hit the master bedroom. "We drilled holes through it 20 feet into the ground, injected grout and bolted it into place with steel rods," he says.

The architect also took great pains to preserve the many lodgepole pines, spruces and aspens that surround the house, resulting in a design that appears almost fragmented. Even so, the house is compact, a carefully detailed mix of concrete, glass and wood elements, upholding the gently curved standing-seam metal roofs.

"It's Rocky Mountain contemporary," principal architect Jack K. Snow says of the house he and his associate Renato Jose built in Colorado. The slope "demanded an innovative design," says Snow. "From the garage and main entrance, an elevator and stair tower rises three stories to a glass bridge that accesses the main living areas."

The interior architectural details are flawlessly integrated as well. An elegant barrel-vaulted ceiling, one of several, spans the entire length of the living room and stair hall. Here Snow designed an intricate, weblike steel-truss system to support glue-laminated purlins that are attached to the fir ceiling.

Furniture, fabrics and light fixtures are also well coordinated with the architecture. Designer Laurel Quint, of the Denver-based firm Q Interior Design, was brought in to help select furnishings for the interiors. She ran all her choices by Snow, accepted his rejections and followed his lead. "I took Jack's dictation. When you work with an architect with that kind of strong presence and you don't get creative, you're doing a disservice to him and also to the client." In the living room, they grouped as much furniture as possible along the massive concrete fireplace wall, instead of arranging pieces around the perimeter of the space, to offset the size of the room.

Metal chairs, which are mixed with a comfortable sofa and armchair and assorted modern pieces, complement the railings in the stair hall and the trussing.

After the house was completed, it was clear that Snow did indeed make a big deal of getting there, and this was just what the owner wanted. Recalls the architect, "Most of my best projects come from clients like this, who have expressed what they want and then let me come up with a solution to the inevitable puzzle. Best of all, he liked the bridge and tower idea from the beginning, and I didn't have to draw up a lot of alternative plans, which wouldn't have worked, to prove to him the validity of what was in my heart to begin with."

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